At their gatherings around a table I participated from a back row. If they were in a pizzeria I also took a seat but I didn’t eat with them, and they didn’t invite me to do so. Boys of my age did not go out to dinner. I would meet Daniele and the others after I had eaten at home. I would stay and watch their high spirits, their noisy laughter, and even in the confusion of their voices I could single out Caia’s laughter from the others. I would play a stupid game. I’d put an ice cube in my mouth and hold it there until it melted, while the nerves in my mouth turned into a tangle of thorns. My teeth froze and I could feel their roots pulsate. They were the keys of a painful organ. With my eyes shut tight, the clamor disintegrated in my ears and I could isolate Caia’s voice, separating it from the noise. The nerves of my mouth jangled for a moment, Caia’s timbre resounded in my head, in my frozen teeth which were as sensitive as antennae. I heard her voice with my teeth. Boys go in for tortures in their search for ecstasy. No one paid any attention to me. I could leave without saying good-bye. If I caught Daniele’s eye, I could tell him I was leaving with a glance.
Maybe Caia liked grown men. I later heard rumors about her crush on Uncle. He was in his forties, was attractive to women, and knew how to tell them they were attractive to him. Uncle was the opposite of the beach macho. There was a sobriety about him, his gestures were measured, precise, more restrained than those of most southerners. His American mother had endowed his looks with something from the West, from the open plains, in his clear eyes, his smooth forehead, the flash of spurs in his smile. You could hear the gallop in his open-throated laugh. During the summer he wore nothing but a shirt tied at the waist, a pair of unpressed pants, and went barefoot. He had an elegance in his carriage that was inimitable. I watched him walk out of a room, open a door, hold a glass, and couldn’t help but recognize that no one could do those things so well. He was always aware of his body. And if he happened to have an accident, ran into a door or stubbed his bare foot, even in his clumsiness he was elegant, dignified, not even then was he awkward. Many years later, when he let himself die rapidly, it was because he had ceased being at the center of his body.
If there had ever been an intimacy, an infatuation between Uncle and Caia, I never even suspected it. Still, I had seen them together at the beach, at friends’ houses, and there was a playfulness between them, but in jest, not like when he knew he was raising goose bumps on a woman’s body. I did not see him turn on his charm with Caia, not in his voice nor in those attentive gestures that made a woman queen for an hour.
I noticed nothing, not even the time Caia came with Daniele and went fishing with us. It had been decided at the last moment, which was why I found myself on the beach early one morning, one person too many. Uncle looked annoyed. Daniele had not told me to stay home. I made my excuses to Uncle and said good-bye to them all. But Caia broke in with a peremptory outburst that was inappropriate. Her sudden interference took us by surprise because a woman, a girl, had no right barging into men’s affairs. “He is here and he comes with us!”—said in a tone it was better to pretend not to have heard. Light was breaking, the sea was calm, her words made a small commotion. Uncle looked at her squarely, beckoned with his head, and I pushed off, jumping into the boat as it slid into the water. Caia’s mood instantly brightened when she saw she had prevailed. Uncle gave her a quick smile in return.
If you go out in a small fishing boat with lines, you can’t drop too many, since they easily get tangled on the bottom because of currents and fish snapping at them, and then it’s a job to get them untangled. I knew that, and for that reason I didn’t fish that day, but I didn’t care. I did mind, however, that Uncle had an extra person on board. With five people it’s crowded, so that on the way out, I sat in the bow with my legs over the rail to keep out of the way. Nicola was at the rudder, Uncle was stretched out, Daniele was cutting bait. Caia came forward. She lay down with her head near my knee. I could look down at her, at a strand of her hair that fell over the rail and bounced with the rocking of the boat. The sea shimmered so brightly behind her I had to squint.
“At times you have certain gestures that remind me of someone who loved me.” She spoke softly, below the level of noise from the diesel motor. I blushed as though she had shouted this to the entire world from a loudspeaker. She had spoken without opening her eyes.
“And you felt the same way about him?”
Caia gave a little nod.
We headed for the shoals of Capri. The trip took a long time; the noise of the motor helped her to talk. I tuned my ear to the frequency of her voice, which I could have made out in a gale. From the stern you couldn’t tell that we were talking. I replied without looking at her, staring straight ahead, speaking words into the wind. I saw a wave rise up higher than the others and understood it would make her head bump against the wood. And so at the moment the bow made contact, I slid my hand between her neck and the boat to cushion the blow. I then withdrew it at once. Caia looked at me from underneath, her face serious, like a child at a window waiting for someone to return. She was seeing something far away, behind me, a hand that had held her head who knows how long ago. I kept my eyes fixed on her. She seemed to be seeing me against the sky without anyone around, without land.
I think we were talking about religion. She had one; she liked to invoke a remote You, but not in a church or in any enclosed place. I replied that I knew nothing about God or love. She believed that there were spirits capable of staying with us and never abandoning us. I, on the other hand, had no one I could call a spirit or an angel, and no notion of what she was feeling. She said that sometimes spirits feel the need to make themselves known, and so for a few seconds enter into the body of someone nearby and through it make some gesture or say something by which she can recognize their presence. But it happens so fast she doesn’t have enough time to communicate that she has received their signal. Did that ever happen to me? Never. No, even if I wanted to say: I too, always, like you, anywhere, yes, from now on I will recognize those I don’t even know. But I couldn’t lie to Caia, not even to please her in her first attempt to speak to me under the cover of a diesel motor.
Daniele called her and she went back to the stern to learn how to put bait on a hook. When the boat was over the shoals and the motor was turned off, voices reached me in the bow, wavering, fragmented, as though from a pail at the bottom of a well. I dropped the anchor, secured it, and came to the middle of the boat as Daniele lowered his line from the bow. Uncle was in the stern, Nicola and Caia on either side, and for as long as it took for the weights to reach the bottom, there was a rapid whoosh of nylon against the palm of the hand. Caia had the first nibble, a shock that frightened a shriek out of her. Uncle instantly heard the line bounce. Dashing to his feet, he gestured with his arm to pull up. Then Nicola had one, then Daniele; we were over a whole school. So as not to pull up all the lines at once, Nicola told me to hold his while he kept Caia from tangling the line that was being pulled into the boat. I could feel the fish on Nicola’s hooks, at least two. I pulled the line up a few meters to raise their wriggling out of the middle of the school so that the other fish wouldn’t be frightened away. “Nzerréa,” Nicola said about the first line brought up. The weight of the hooked fish made the nylon line rubbing along the edge of the boat produce a cicadalike sound, “nzrr, nzrr,” as each arm’s length came up. “Nzerréa,” Nicola said, and Daniele repeated the verb to Caia, explaining its meaning. The plump, shiny fish, shimmering white against the black depths of the sea, were brought on board.